


A New Approach to Grieving

by ELG



Category: X-Men (Original Timeline Movies)
Genre: Captivity, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 20:00:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7282633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ELG/pseuds/ELG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Jean dies, Scott taunts Logan into sex in the Danger Room.</p><p>Set after X2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A New Approach to Grieving

##### A New Approach to Grieving

Scott’s hips roll automatically to the rhythm that Logan sets as the man fucks him to the knife-edge of pain, he’s getting sore but the pleasure’s building pace for pace with the burn of it—too much friction and the solid beat of Logan’s heavy balls against his ass. A moan escapes him before he can bite it down because this is good, this is him being used, long and hard, to a music of harsh grunts, spit-spattered with sweat and musky need, Logan’s hands hard on his hips, bruising him down to the bone. That flesh-tune they’re making, the brisk slap of it, is making his spine arch, his neck crane back. He’s sore and stretched and filled too far and too hard and it’s just what he asked for, just what he wanted, although he had to make Logan blaze up like a forest fire to get here.

 _Taunting him in the Danger Room as if Logan was a high-wire and there was no safety net, mocking him with how light and airy Scott’s grace was beside his metal-bound bulk, every back-flip an Italian salute._ No wonder she chose me over you, Logan, now catch me if you can. _Daring him to just do it, why not, no one was watching and Scott would never tell—If Wolverine could catch him, he could fuck him, just flip him over, force him to his knees and pull down his sweat pants, then plunge on if he wanted to, Scott was giving him permission, hell, he’d give it to him in writing if he wanted him to, that was how sure he was that some lumbering human weapon could never best him here._

“Yes…” 

It gets away from him, that gasp, and Logan pins his wrists, pushes down onto the floor, still angry about the whip-flick of insults Scott has used to draw him in.

“This?” Logan demands, panting harshly. “You wanted this…?” They’re not doing it doggy style any more, that was the first rapid rat-tat-tat, now Scott’s on his back with his knees on his chest, folded up like a letter of sympathy, with his ankles hooked over those massive shoulders, and still Logan’s pressing in deeper with each slamming thrust. Scott’s moan comes from a place too deep to have a name and Logan is harsher than ever: “Tell me that it hurts.”

“No.”

“Tell me to make it stop.”

“No.” 

Another moan breaks free, a twist of pleasure on a breath-hitch of pain, no one can hurt him enough, there is no degradation or disgrace that will last long enough or bruise him deep enough to punish him for his failure to save Jean. But Logan is slowing. He has tried fucking him harder and faster, and Scott has writhed and arched into it, welcoming the bruising slam of anger and grief that so perfectly mirrors his own, yet now that relentless battering ram rhythm is failing both of them. 

“Don’t stop…” The panic catches in his voice as Logan falters because this is the first time in days that he hasn’t been trapped by his own thoughts. He prefers this enslavement—tethered to a solid body pounding his whose angry animal vigour hurts just enough to hold his attention. “Logan, please….” The fear of being left with only his grief for company is enough to override self-respect, and he puts his arms around his neck, drags him down for a needy kiss. “Don’t stop….”

Logan’s answering kiss is angry and tender, bruising his mouth, a claim and a question at once. It’s just sensation, their sweat-slicked bodies hard and slippery as they slide over each other’s tender planes, Logan’s fingers a blackening bruise on his hip bones, the cock sliding in, opening him up, just too long and too thick for comfort so the extremity of every thrust is a pleasurable wince. He arches into it, rocking into the rhythm as Logan pushes on, finds his sweet spot with each solid slide in, his grunts baffled but aroused, the metal-burdened body a pressing weight on his, deft and heavy as his cock. Logan comes with a grunt and a savage slam of his hips, and Scott cries out as Logan pants, animal-loud, as he spurts in hotly, driving in impossibly deep. Scott struggles and Logan keeps him pinned, says, “Damnit, Cyke. Tell me that it hurts.”

“Keep going.”

“I’ve nothing left.” Logan eases out—Scott feels every inch of it and the hot gush of come the man has filled him with running out. The emptiness is terrible. If he’s not filled with pain and lust and want and need he will fill up with grief and burst open at every poisoned seam. Logan thrusts his fingers inside him roughly, snarls something incomprehensible, flips him over onto his hands and knees, and finger-fucks him while Scott braces himself on his elbows, arches into it, the soreness and the sparks of sensation that fill up his body and his mind and overwhelm his thoughts. The mouth on his spine makes him jolt, the licking heat of a tongue tracing the bones, the voice is rough: “This isn’t the answer.”

Scott twists his head round and says, “It’s the only thing that’s helped.” 

Logan still wants him; Logan wants him to the marrow; and it’s shocked both of them how Scott, in his bitter, unreachable grief, has this power over both of their destinies, he’s struck a match in the dark and set off a dynamite stick neither one of them knew was there. Nothing in all the aching days since Jean’s demise has given him a whisper of this power and he is heady with it, drunk on hunger and grief and an ache that won’t let up. This bruising of body against body, another man inside him, deep and needful, is as intoxicating as opium. He lets Logan pull him every which way, drag him up by the wrists, kiss him hungrily, suck on his neck, bite then lick, nibble gently, lick the tears from his salt-burned skin.

“You don’t need to be broken into any more pieces.”

What does it matter, now that he’s cracked? Sooner or later he’s going to shatter anyway. But Logan is smoothing his sweat-damp hair back from his face, straightening his claw-rent rags. He runs a finger down Scott’s cheek and Scott flinches from the gentleness of that touch as he never flinched from a cock rammed into him, right to the hilt. 

“Just tell me that it hurts,” Logan says. 

Scott shakes his head. “It’s numb.”

He has no idea why Logan just kissed him like that, that nuzzling and coaxing, that tender brush of lips against lips, Scott just knows that if he kisses him back, he will break open and honey will run out of him and blood and salt and grief.

Logan’s voice is a low, oddly musical, growl: “When was the last time you slept, for fuck’s sake? When was the last time you ate? You’re dizzy with hunger and grief, and three-parts crazy. If you were anywhere close to sane you’d know not to be doing this.”

“Let’s just fuck again.” He has never said the word ‘fuck’ aloud before. He is shocked and impressed with himself at once. He feels like an astronaut on a long tether, high above the earth. Except he is the earth and the tether is broken and everything is happening so far away that it hardly matters that there isn’t any air.

“You can’t heal a broken heart like this.”

“I don’t want to think any more. You helped me not to think.” 

Scott inhales him and becomes aware of sex scents, sour and true, and sweat and that musk of beer and pheromones that he has learned to associate with Logan. He realizes that he hasn’t opened his eyes for a long time, not since Logan slid home—that he wanted the sensation, not the shame. When he opens his eyes they feel wounded, he flinches from the lightness of the room. He flinches from the baffled look in Logan’s eyes.

“Scott—this—what you and I just did way too many times and with nothing like enough lube—that isn’t helping.” Logan’s voice is unnecessarily kind. “I think this is you having a nervous breakdown.”

“This is me trying not to.” Scott is surprised by how sane his own voice sounds. He moistens his lips and realizes they are dry and there is an ache inside him that is like nothing he has ever known before, it makes him feel conquered and connected to Logan in a way that on any other day would make him bristle like an angry cat. He feels sticky and sore and a surprised part of himself likes it, feeling like property, claim-staked on the fly. 

Logan is still doing things to his hair, trying to smooth it and tidy it and put things back how they were—render Scott some measured creature who is aloofly reserved again. 

“You need better help than this. You need to admit to someone that she’s gone and it hurts.”

“I’ve had nervous breakdowns before. I always run away to something worse. I ran away from the orphanage and my eyes betrayed me. They turned into weapons and me into a monster.” They made him feel he deserved everything Jack Winters told him he was, and everything he did. Sometimes they still do.

“The only monsters in that story were the ones you ran away from.” Logan shakes him again, makes him look at him properly—as properly as he can look at anyone through a red haze and ruby quartz. “You have to find it in yourself. I know it’s there.”

“What?” His body is aching and thrumming and so oddly sore. He didn’t come once but he shivered on the brink and it was pleasurable—he would have liked to live on that peak for a month.

Logan shakes him again, so roughly that Scott feels bruises blossoming under his thumbs; his body is slack and compliant and doesn’t much mind being shaken; it’s a little like the brief relief of reverberation when the pain is so bad that banging his head against the wall actually helps. 

“The will to live, dammit!” Logan’s heat is blazing, sweaty and rank and not familiar yet, although there are hard edges that have moulded themselves insistently to his, places where their bruises would match perfectly, like the contours of continents. The shaking ends abruptly when Logan pulls him in and holds him tight. “Are you going to run this time?”

It’s as easy to curl into that bulky heat as not, but he still wants to find the something worse that’s waiting for him, like a crocodile just beneath the waterline; one snap of its jaws and no more pain. “Yes.”

“No.”

He jumps at the savagery of Logan’s response. “You’re not going anywhere—not even out of your mind. I will lock you in, Scott. I will chain you to the fucking bed, do you hear me?”

He has no idea why Logan is shouting at him, fear roughening his voice. He feels mildly affronted. “I can get out of handcuffs. I practise.”

“You won’t get out of mine.”

Abruptly he is hauled to his feet and discovers that his legs are made of liquorice and won’t hold him up. Logan catches him, looking wild and tortured and angry. He shakes Scott again, spins him round, tugs at his clothing—it takes Scott a moment to realize that he is trying to make Scott look presentable.

“Do you know what protective custody is?”

Scott can’t see the relevance but dredges up from the back of his mind some kind of dictionary definition. Logan just shakes him again. He goes with the shaking, understanding why trees bend with the wind; he realizes that it doesn’t matter what someone does to him as long as they make him feel something, because then he doesn’t need to think and thinking is torture. That scent of beer and sweat and drying come is starting to seem quite pleasant to him. He breathes Logan in and wonders why his sourness smells better than other men’s sweetness. He knows men who wear excellent cologne, but they wouldn’t pin him down and come inside him with a possessive grunt and they wouldn’t shake him and they wouldn’t drag him, muttering darkly about incomprehensible things. Logan feels like the world’s worst designed safety net but Scott is still ready to fall onto him again when Logan gets himself back to the point. 

If he could come he thinks he might be tired enough to sleep, and tells Logan as much, surprised by the realization and wanting to share it. Leaving is starting to seem too difficult in any case, not just because Logan is now dragging him in quite the wrong direction, but because he has no strength in his legs and his head feels heavy and light at once.

They take the elevator although he always takes the stairs and their reflections are dim ruby things, indistinct and dream-like upon the metal walls. Logan has an arm fast around his waist as they doors swoosh open, and moves him briskly, as if they are competing in a three-legged race. They go into a strange bedroom with no scents or photographs that he recognizes and his brain automatically calculates that they are somewhere in the east wing. Nothing much happens there, although the robot vacuums toil up and down the wooden hallways, collecting dust and frail debris. The room is rather grand and sad with disuse. There is a lonely double bed made up.

“I think I hid in that wardrobe once when Hank was supposed to be searching for us blindfolded, just using his enhanced senses.” His heart had begun to hammer with the excitement of being a thing hunted by someone strong but safe—although not perhaps always safe because Hank, after all, had his inner beast. When Hank had laid hands upon him, he had yearned for something nameless and Hank had been intrigued by his scent, hands gentle, kindly, shy. There was a line and they had not crossed it. Now he wants to vault over it into the rough wilds beyond. 

“You people and your stupid games,” Logan says savagely. “It’s like he trained you for everything but life.” The windows are shuttered and they are far from the rest of the house, the sound of the children so muffled by distance as to give an illusion of silence. It feels as if the world is tiny and there are only the two of them in it. It seems relevant again that Logan stopped upon the road to pick up Rogue—a tactical mistake perhaps to seek short, sharp punishment from a long-cocked man in the habit of picking up strays.

Logan says, “Clean yourself up, Scott.” 

The bathroom is a place of white tiles and he can shower on automatic pilot—peeling off clothes, running water, using soap, rinsing and shampooing as if any of it matters—and does so mechanically until Logan comes in and inspects him anxiously as if he is a child who still needs to be told to wash behind his ears. They fall onto the bed in a tangle of damp towels and Logan kisses him with inappropriate tenderness, his heavy bulk a welcome press, pinning him to the bed. Slicked fingers find his sleeping places and wake them up again—this time, drowsy with hot water and warm steam, he relaxes into it. Logan finds the right notes. Plays the perfect chord and Scott cries out. He sounds anguished but he has gone through all the proper stages this time, instead of remaining half-heartedly half-hard, swelling with interest and leaping to release. He falls straight into darkness with Logan still kissing him resentfully, brooding and angry and at a loss.

 

Their bodies are wired differently—Scott has disciplined his to obey, he keeps it taut and trained, graceful and pliable, he bends to the will of the arc he is making; he has never been fearless but he always jumps as if he can bear the pain, sometimes when he lands, he breaks, and the pain is a white fire in whatever has snapped, but it fades, unlike the sting of failure, which does not. Logan is loose and comfortable, the metal lighter than it looks in the x-rays, welded to him like inner armour. He is used to its weight, to his own weight and bulk. He is fuelled by anger and he is truly fearless. He is comfortable with his own dark deeps—even lets himself revel in how dangerous he is. Scott could revel in how dangerous he is as well, it could come too easily—a lover who is also a death-wish, his fuse perpetually lit.

Logan is now his jailor and his lover and possibly his friend. He is the keeper of the yale key that Scott could pick if he wanted to but although he tries the door handle from time to time, more than turning it feels like too much effort. He goes instead with Logan’s flow—Logan keeps Scott locked up in this shuttered room and feeds him the way Winters did, with candy bars and sweetened fizz—it reminds him of his time with Winters, except the bed is comfortable and not a stained mattress on the floor and no one beats him this time, although they sometimes loudly threaten to. There is the same prowling sense of rage almost on the point of breaking out, but Logan doesn’t tell him that he’s property. He just treats him as if he is. Scott doesn’t care. It has felt since the day of Jean’s sacrifice as if he’s dwelling in death’s waiting room, anyway, what does it matter if Logan is disputing with the Grim Reaper for ownership? Except the analogy hardly works because Winters didn’t fuck him and Scott didn’t want him to. Even now, when it feels as if nothing can reach him, the thought of Winters touching him the way Logan does makes him shudder. But Logan makes something coil in his guts, heated and anticipatory. He brings his baffled anger into the room and his sweat-scent and his beer-breath and it feels right. It’s the only thing that rouses Scott at all. He is indifferent to the menu or the difference between day and night, shutters open, shutters closed. He doesn’t care that Logan keeps him locked in where death can’t easily find him. But he likes it when Logan fucks him. He likes the way it hurts and the way it doesn’t; that strange stretch that makes his guts clench and his balls tighten as Logan slides in. 

Logan is angry with him all the time for having let himself get so damn damaged, but he puts it aside when the bed is creaking under their combined weight, even though Scott has told him that he doesn’t care, he can fuck him through the mattress for all he cares, fuck him ass-raw and bleeding if it will help Logan through it; he just needs a sensation to shut down his brain—it doesn’t have to be a good one. Nothing makes Logan angrier than that. He already feels Scott tricked him into this, played sane in the Danger Room for just long enough to sucker him in. He hates a world in which he has to be the sensible one; one where Scott shrugs and says what does it matter anyway, the world went under with that last wave and there is a fire now under the sea.

“She died to save you—and it isn’t on you because she didn’t give you a damn choice, but what is on you is not thinking about what she thought she was saving you for—as a functional fucking human being trying to make the world a better place.”

“But it isn’t,” Scott points out reasonably. Jean isn’t in it now so how could it be?

Logan shakes him again, growling like a terrier having to deal with a persistently tiresome rat. Scott suspects that no one else knows that he’s here. That Logan is feeding him on junk food and just enough canned fruit and snow peas to ward off scurvy because they think he is elsewhere, which means the Professor must be somewhere else or else he would know. The Professor has too many control issues to let Scott deal with his trauma through self-loathing and rough sex. There would have been a lecture if he were here. He would have played some familiar enigma variation of: _Scott, I love you, but…_ There is always a ‘but’ with the people who love him. Jean was the only one who just said _Scott, I love you_ as if it needed no qualification, no _despite the fact you’re an uptight rule-following repressed self-loathing rage-inducing fuck up_ , because Jean found his faults endearing. Logan finds his faults infuriating. He discovers that he rather likes that about Logan. Scott, after all, finds Scott’s faults infuriating too.

Time passes oddly, like a man shuffling sideways through an unfamiliar room.

He doesn’t miss people—except for the continuing unbearable absence of Jean as a voice in his ear and his mind—but he begins to miss workouts in the Danger Room, to miss his body finding music in flips and leaps and handsprings. This, at least, is beginning to make him jib at his confinement but it feels like a test he has set himself now—not to leave until Logan lets him out. He suspects that Logan is restricting him on purpose, pushing him into a sugar high and then keeping him cooped up. The restlessness makes him pace and do sit ups and push ups and then fall into frivolities—trying to see how far he can walk on his hands. He breaks the shower rail trying to use it for gymnastics and finds himself wanting to cartwheel as if he was five years old again, inspired by the swallows darting overhead. He misses the fluidity of fight scenes; the closest he has ever come to flying. He begins to notice that he is bored. Slowly, uncomfortably, sanity begins to settle again, heavy as silt. He misses his brief, careless madness as it begins to fade.

Logan kisses him too carefully and feeds him pineapple rings out of a garish tin.

“How much do you want to die today?” he asks.

“I miss the Danger Room.” It comes out sulky and reluctant but it’s an undeniable truth.

Something like a gleam of hope shows in Logan’s eyes. “There’s no point in being mission-ready if you’re not fit to lead a mission, Scott.”

That shakes something loose and he feels some strategy reassembling itself, arrows of attack, high, low, clandestine, full frontal, subterfuge. Using their strengths against them. Hugging one’s own weaknesses close. “What mission?” 

“Any mission.”

There is definitely something stirring that he thought was dead or at least in a very deep sleep. “Is Magneto doing anything insane today?”

“He’s not having to be locked in a shuttered room by a guy with metal claws to stop him from killing himself—so he’s ahead on points of some mutants I could mention.”

Scott grimaces. “Harsh.”

“Fair.”

“What about Mystique?”

“Banging Sabretooth last thing I heard.”

He is boggled by the thought of banging Sabretooth and grimaces. “Ouch.”

“She’s a shapeshifter, Scott. I imagine that makes it easier to avoid the ouch factor.”

“All the same.” It’s not just the size—although the size is terrifying—or the hair-trigger temper, it’s the way Sabretooth smells like rage and wet mountain lion after a lightning storm. “Not restful,” he says.

Logan looks torn between indignation and confusion. “Am I…restful…?”

“You’re consistent.” Logan is like a piece of old machinery who smells of engine oil and grumbles relentlessly but is oddly reliable all the same. “I like that you’re consistent.”

“I’m consistently pissed with you, if that’s what you mean.” 

“Yes.” That, too, is one of the things he finds comforting. Logan has limited sympathy for the way Scott has fallen apart and has to fight all the time they are together not to shake or slap him back to himself again. He wants Scott to be someone else. He wants Scott to be who he was before even though the Scott he was before was someone Logan wanted to shake and slap. He is reliably unreasonable upon the subject. When he fucks Scott—which he does daily—he does it with an oddly touching mixture of tenderness and irritation. It annoys him that Scott has the power to arouse him and he disapproves of their relationship. Logan is a romantic and Scott has strange boundaries. Logan is the one always telling him that Scott is prudish and repressed but he is also the one who dislikes the way that Scott enjoys rough sex.

“Could you at least _try_ to be a little less fucked up, Cyke?”

“The woman I loved died. I didn’t deal with it very well. That’s not going to change.”

“How many nervous breakdowns have you had?”

Scott shrugs, bored with the subject. “I lost count a few traumas ago. Does it matter?”

“Remind me again why you were put in charge of the X-Men?”

“Because I wasn’t any good at anything else. Because no one else wanted the job. Because Charles was trying to give me a sense of purpose. Because I’m a no-life loser who likes to read Sun-Tzu. Because I was the first one he took in and I was so grateful to be shown some affection that I followed him blindly and did what I was told.” It’s not an interesting topic—how damaged he is—he wonders why everyone else is so obsessed with it. 

Logan kisses him, fingers gentle in his hair, mouth tender on his lips.

“I don’t need coaxing, Logan. Just tell me how you want me?”

“I need foreplay, Cyke, even if you don’t.”

“Then tell me where you want me to kiss you? Tell me where you want me to touch you?”

“Where do you want to touch me, Scott…?”

It’s a strange question and it makes something stir again. No one hugged him for eight years. Not from when his parents’ plane blew up in front of him until the first night he spent in the mansion. He appreciated Xavier making the effort to give him some comfort and tell him kind things because he isn’t a tactile man and no one hugged him as a child, either. Magneto, ironically, is more touchy-feely, and he’s not exactly approachable. He wonders how long it’s been for Logan and feels ice crack inside him followed by something that might be the prelude to a thaw. He puts his arms around him and mouths his chest, traces a nipple with his tongue, pushes him down, suddenly wants more than just the pleasurable sensation of being efficiently fucked. Logan gulps as Scott tongues and touches and kisses him, nibbles very gently. His scent is still comforting. He is as hard as adamantium and as warm and soft as skin. Scott loves that about him. It’s possible that he just loves him. It occurs to him, out of nowhere, that in all these days and days where he has been thinking how impossible life is to bear without Jean that he has only just now noticed that he cannot contemplate life without Logan, that losing Jean is a constant dull ache but losing Logan would be a blade in the side.

“Are you going to leave when I get better?”

“Are you going to stay crazy just to keep me here?”

“Would it work?” He’s afraid to ask the question but asks it anyway.

A long pause in which Logan’s fingers tease his hair and Scott kisses a straight line from between Logan’s breast bone to his navel. “It probably would.”

“Why?”

“Because I think the world’s a better place with you in it and because Jean wanted you to have a life, and because I took a wrong turn somewhere and got fucking fond of you, Summers, you dick.”

Scott inhales his warm scent and nuzzles his hip. He can’t feel the metal, it just feels like bone, he wonders if it conducts his kisses, if it sends them down the nerves like a musical note. He licks down, licks in, Logan’s balls heavy on his tongue, snuffling into the crook of his thigh. He tastes like reality with no blurring, a salt, sour, sweat-taste. He tastes like life.

“I think I got fond of you, too,” he admits. “I think I may owe you my life.”

Easing him up, Logan says in confusion, “Why me, Scott? Why sex with me?”

“I don’t know.” He doesn’t. It had just felt like the only thing that might help. It still does. Sometimes he thinks there had been a long fuse burning for weeks, from the moment Logan had grabbed him and jolted him in roughly, like he didn’t matter at all, that uncomfortable instant when they had been too close for just a moment too long and the blue touch paper had been lit. “Maybe we were always meant to be…something.” Friends. Enemies. Rivals. Lovers. All of those things at once.

“We’re something all right.”

“Just because it isn’t rose petals and violins doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have meaning.”

“You like it when I hurt you, Cyke. Sometimes I like it too. How is that not fucked up?”

“Do you think Jean never hurt me? Do you think I never liked it?” He lifts his gaze from Logan’s thighs and surprises a look of shock on his face. “I used to have a lot of headaches, tell Jean I had reports to write then jerk off in the showers to thoughts of her making me take more than I could bear. And she knew—she was a telepath. Of course, she knew. And after Liberty Island….”

“After Liberty Island…what…?”

“She got bolder about taking what she wanted and I liked it when she did. I’m allowed to want the things I want. Jean taught me that. She said it didn’t make me dirty and I didn’t need to feel ashamed.”

“Well, it does make you dirty and you ought to feel ashamed, you fucked-up weirdo.” Logan draws him gently onto his lap and kisses him. “There are dark places in me, Scott. I was made into a monster every bit as bad as those other men who liked locking you up and calling you their property.”

“If you were a telepath you’d know there are tar pits in my psyche and a score of locked rooms I will probably never let you in. Because I don’t know how to let people in, Logan.”

“You think I do?”

Scott sighs in relief. “No. I know you’re a brooding emotional trainwreck, too. I wouldn’t inflict myself on someone who wasn’t damaged. It wouldn’t be fair.”

Logan acknowledges the point with a grimace. “Yeah, well, I admit that graduates of the Weapon X program aren’t exactly the greatest catch in town.” His hands coax Scott, move and shape him like clay, supporting his thighs as Scott wriggles onto his lap, steadies himself on Logan’s broad shoulders. He can feel the strength there, the muscle and bone. He kisses a bicep, Logan nuzzles his neck. They are incompatible in almost every way save this one, but, boy, are they maddeningly, tantalizingly, intoxicatingly simpatico in the sack. Fingers help spread him as he spreads himself, wanting it still, even as the other wants are beginning to drift back. For some reason, he doesn’t feel the need to deny himself this; perhaps because although he is a dirty, damaged thing, so, too, is Logan. He is soiling no one with his skin because Logan’s is already bloodstained. One day he thinks Logan might fuck him with the deer-horn handle of a hunting knife and they will both like it.

Outside, beyond the shutters, the weathered cracks reveal that the sun is rising as a chorus of birds begin to sing. He thinks of Jean and the pain is…survivable. This time when the great wave sweeps in he doesn’t long to be beneath it with her. He only watches it sadly from the shore.

He pushes down on the slick, hard length, bears the heated stretch, the slide and burn, holds fast to Logan’s shoulders, weathers his steady, questioning gaze. Feels their shared heat pooling somewhere in his gut, sits down onto it, savouring every inch. Wonders for the first time in what feels like forever what is happening out there, beyond his locked door. Closes his eyes as the first hard thrust spears him just right, rides it to the rhythm that Logan lets him set, pushing down to meet the strong push up as it sparks in him, deep and sure, kindles flames, kindles warmth. As the sun rises higher and Logan’s cock connects him to the world of heated skin and another beating heart, he feels the full thaw set in. Somehow their fingers are laced, and the touch is light and steady. Even through ruby quartz he realizes that angry, baffled, resentful Logan is looking at him with something much too close to love. The grip tightens and he feels himself tugged back from the brink. Feels himself come back to life.

##### End


End file.
